


(I'm Falling) Don't Catch Me

by th_esaurus



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Assault, F/M, Honeypot, Hurt/Comfort, Mission Fic, Unsafe Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-06 06:48:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14636310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: Gaby has always hated being defined by the men in her life. The father who left her. The chop shop boys who took pity on her. The spymaster forced to bring her into play. And now Illya. Everything about Illya is so obvious, and she can put her finger on none of him.





	(I'm Falling) Don't Catch Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luminarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luminarium/gifts).



> this fic got somewhat darker than intended... ;D
> 
> thanks to everyone who put up with me yelling about this for two months.

**iv. the state of affairs**

Gaby breathes steadily. The air in the hotel room has been too thick all night, the temperature turned up high to overcompensate for the biting Swiss winter. She’s tempted to go to the window and stick her clammy head out into the snow-flecked night for a moment, but she doesn’t want to touch anything. Not yet.

She does everything methodically, fighting a rising panic.

Her bare feet first: she checks them for blood, runs her thumb over the hardened sole to check for glass. Then her hip, where the most of it shattered, and her back. Surface nicks on both, and one a little deeper, a greenish splinter of wet glass jabbing through the skin above her pelvis. She hisses as she pulls it out with her forefinger and thumbnail; it's not deep. She holds the heel of her hand against the wound as if it were heavy cut, more for the pressure than any need to stem the blood, and fumbles one-handed for a tissue to wrap the glass. She spends too long checking under her nails: did she scratch him? She can’t remember. Is the dust gathered under there from scrabbling at the carpet in her hysteria or is it his skin; his viscera? She can’t--she can’t remember.

She presses both palms to her neck, not quite squeezing. Sore already. The muscles bruised.

Her breath comes out shaky, and Gaby swears, angry about it.

She needs to wash her hands. That comes first. She walks to the bathroom, one foot consciously in front of the other, and lathers up her hands, and lets the tap run across her knuckles until it’s almost scalding. Her toes curl against the tile so she can bear it. Then she yanks the faucet to blast out that cold Alpine water, and puts her mouth to it, drinks, dribbling, lets it course over her reddened cheeks and forehead. A little water trickles the wrong way, into her ear like a lost fly, and it makes her shudder, her sudden sobs drowned by the gushing water.

Off. Dry. Another breath. Methodical again. She finds her knickers and her slip, and shimmies into them, the awkward motion making her smart. Covered, she thinks she can face him.

She marches straight past his body, fetches her abandoned dress. Back to the bed, veering wide again. The thick carpet is lapping up his blood eagerly; a trickle now. Not that shocking gush it was at first.

She perches on the edge of the unmade bed. Looks at her hands. They’re clean; they are clean.

And then all in a swift motion, she grabs for the telephone, puts it to her ear, and dials down to reception. She knows exactly what to say.

“I’m so sorry to call this late, could I--yes, of course. Could I request a wake up call? --Room 381. Yes. 7.45am. Oh, coffee, please. Thank you.”

Good. She sounded--good. Any weary shaking could be chalked up to the midnight hour and her nocturnal--excursions.

The boys have the line tapped.

They’ll be with her soon.

Illya will be--

Well. With her, soon enough.

**i. the mark**

She never was an avid reader - learned with her hands instead of dull recitation - so Gaby delights in having Napoleon summarise. He spins ever such a good yarn. Illya sits with his ankles crossed and his eyes firmly on the manila mission briefing, pretending not to listen.

The mark, Ivan Kuznetsov - “a real John Doe,” Napoleon says, dry - is a Russian exile, ten a penny in these trying times. Bound for an unceremonious death in Siberia, he was smuggled out to West Europe as human bartering chip by allies with their eyes on a far less comradely prize. The charges were ridiculous in the first instance: some jumped up accusation of insurgency, embezzlement, fraud; whatever Old Peril’s benevolent superiors could sling at such an unassuming fellow.

“Not KGB,” Illya spits, ruining his facade of indifference. “CPSU.”

Napoleon gives him a withering salute. “It’s all politics to me,” he shrugs.

Gaby knows some of this tit-for-tat is for her benefit. Napoleon can’t resist making a pretty girl smile; Illya can’t fathom letting his insolence lie.

In truth, Kuznetsov’s long-estranged sister had been recently peppered with friendly fire trying to cross the Sino-Soviet border into China. “Blood has always been considered thicker than water in Russia,” Napoleon says, a little carefully, and Gaby can see the tension in Illya’s shoulders, even though his head is back down in the paperwork.

They had argued, once, and Gaby had snapped that she was not Illya’s mother. The truth had tumbled out in fits and starts that night: his stoic, loving, fraud of a father, his mother who would do anything in her diminished power to protect them both. Gaby was weak for his weaknesses, it turned out.

She forgets what they’d argued over. Only that they made love for hours afterwards.

“Kuznetsov,” Napoleon says pointedly, and Gaby frowns at her own daydreaming, “was never of criminal stock.” Kept his head down, worked hard, rose several ranks in his locals munitions factory, regularly pledged his allegiance to the Party. “But revenge is a tenacious sort of mould. Spreads fast wherever it takes hold.” A handful of his long-overlooked engineer comrades sequestered him out to the West and kept in precarious touch.

No love lost with his dead sister.

“He’s been in Switzerland for the last four months, playing bad poker,” Napoleon says, casually louche. She can tell what he’s thinking. Good beer and gambling, furs for the cold, high rollers to peacock for. Napoleon can be shrewd, she thinks, but he adores making a show of things.

Illya, for whom work has always been a matter of nobility, a defence against his skewered family history, cannot stand Napoleon’s games.

(As for Gaby? She would scoff before examining her own tastes that closely. But she built box cars as a little girl, with spluttering engines that threw her down the rolling Saxon hills and often spat her out again at the bottom; she has a tendency to thrill-seek.)

The poker games, of course, were a place to network, sowing the seeds for a tentative business, with Kuznetsov as the middleman. A poor player - though sometimes lucky, for nobody can lose at poker every time - he wrangled invites from interested parties; bet low, took names, drank vodka. “You can take the man out of Russia,” Napoleon says, “but you can’t--”

“Enough,” Illya snaps. “Go on with your tall tales.”

“He’s smuggling contraband out of the Soviet Union,” Napoleon finishes, put out. “Information, specifically. Weapon schematics, R&D, classified arms data. Russia’s military secrets for the highest bidder - a mule for his engineer comrades. Money changes hands, he pockets his commission, _et voila._ ”

America wants him as a defector, and they aren’t subtle when courting. He’s a well of information on the USSR’s position in the ever-fraught arms race. Russia, of course, wants him returned without ceremony, debriefed, and executed. Britain always likes these tug-of-wars it has no great stake in; it gives them fodder. Someone to exchange in a tight corner. “Bring him back to the Circus,” Waverly had said, a twinkle in his eye.

“Our darling Gaby is the star of the show,” Napoleon announces. Gaby knows this part already. Waverly had let Napoleon expand on the details, but had spoken to her briefly, alone, and asked her without really asking her at all if she was willing - for a mission - to sleep with a mark. “You’ll do splendidly,” he told her, always faintly patronising.

“Seduce the mark,” Gaby says, reeling off her tasks like a to-do list. “Get him drunk, wear him out. A few drops of laudanum to keep him asleep, and then his room is ripe for the picking.” She’s to turn it over, with light footsteps and lighter fingers. Anything she can get her hands on: names of contacts, bills of sale, the blueprints themselves if she’s lucky; or just a forwarding address where M15 can approach him, somewhere less public, less noisy. Offer him money, or perhaps just an ultimatum.

“Absolutely not,” Illya says suddenly. He doesn’t shout it, but his voice has the low shake of a man terrified of his convictions. Napoleon gives him an oddly sharp look, but Gaby ignores him.

“That’s the mission,” she says, flighty. _Fact-finding_ , Waverly had called it.

“You’ll be upstairs,” Napoleon tells him, in that clear, crisp way that means he’ll brook no argument. “Waiting for Gaby’s call for backup, which, all being well, will never come. Excuse the indelicacy,” he says, not trying to temper his words in the slightest, “but the mark has a healthy paranoia and you’re _distinctly_ Russian.”

“No,” Illya murmurs again. “Too dangerous.”

“He has one bodyguard, and I’ll be undercover at the poker table.”

“You think I can’t hold my own?” Gaby barks, all of a sudden. Both of them look at her, but Illya’s gaze doesn’t linger. He frowns down at his knees, avoiding her in a way she finds brooding and petulant. He’s childish about the things he’s possessive of, and she knows very well that includes her.

Gaby has always hated being defined by the men in her life. The father who left her. The chop shop boys who took pity on her. The spymaster forced to bring her into play. And now Illya. Everything about Illya is so obvious, and she can put her finger on none of him.

“You think I can’t hold my own, or you just hate the idea of another man’s dick inside me?”

Illya’s on his feet at once, the files sliding to the floor around his shoes. His right hand, the dominant one, is taut and open, his fingers stretched wide, and Gaby knows it’s how he forces himself not to make a fist. She looks up at him, her chest puffed out, daring.

“All right,” Napoleon snaps, a weary look in his eyes that makes Gaby feel a little bad for riling Illya up. He shouldn’t get irked so easily, she decides. “Simmer down, now.”

“You play your poker, Cowboy,” Illya tells him, viciously uneasy. He doesn’t excuse himself. Just leaves. A man, Gaby thinks angrily, never needs to justify himself.

If he expects Gaby to come console him--

Well, she and Napoleon talk on it a little, later. Once the plan of action is settled and he’s zipping up her dress; too slinky, too sequined, ostentatious. Gunmetal grey. “You’re always hard on him,” Napoleon says, appraising Gaby with a gentle smile. He seems sadder than he has any right to be.

“He trusts me too much. It’s burned him before.”

“He does have trouble hedging his bets,” Napoleon murmurs.

“It’s not my job to coddle him.”

“Not your job, no. But it could be a predilection.”

“Don’t match-make,” Gaby snaps. Napoleon knows full well she and Illya are sleeping together. Perhaps not regularly, but often enough for a sort of significance she considers--compromising.

Napoleon raises his hands in defence. “I’d never dream of it.”

He slips a thin charm bracelet onto her left wrist, her costume on loan from Waverly, and she wonders who it once belonged to.

“Go easy on him,” Napoleon says again, smoothing down the front of her skirt. “And on yourself.”

Gaby just clucks her tongue. “How do I look?”

“To die for,” Napoleon tells her.

**ii. the mistake**

Glamour is strange to Gaby, but not unsuited to her.

There is an understated luxury to the hotel, picked for its discretion: tall windows fogged pleasantly by the mountainside, the quiet Swiss clerks, cut crystal, thick leather and smoky scotch. The cardsharp is a lean, quick-handed brute, with no time for fools and unbothered by the money on the table. Gaby likes watching him work, the way the cards seem to slide from his palms as though from under his skin, a part of him.

She’s the only pretty girl in the room who isn’t a waitress. The sensation of eyes on her, prickling the back of her neck, is something she’s used to. Illya, she knows, is always watching her, whether that’s wise or not. She suspects the latter. Still, it’s been good practise, shrugging off his attention. She knows how well it can rile a man.

Her dress has been hemmed to make her look slight, cinched at the waist, drapery around her fragile neck, and she supposes the idea is to seem coy and easy. She simply acts like she always does when she knows more than the rest of the men in the room. If Waverly wanted sleight of hand, he should’ve hired a magician, not a mechanic.

Napoleon, ostentatiously, tries to buy her a drink in the early hours of the night. He’s brash, noisy, enjoying himself too much, pushing his accent a little southwards: “Well, Miss - I’m assumin’ it’s Miss - I sure would like to wet your palate if you’ll let me? Say, what’s your poison?”

“Self-inflicted,” she says cooly, dismissing him. He’ll make her laugh if he tries too hard. Waverly will be pissy regardless: Napoleon has been chastised more than once for his theatricality.

But it relaxes her. The stakes don’t feel high; for the poker players, maybe, but not for Gaby. It’s all play, the dress, the attitude, the night’s planned liaison. She slept with a supplier once who’d promised the parts she needed a week faster than anyone else in the East if she’d let him use her mouth. She’d simply weighed up the pros and cons: she liked her chop shop’s reputation and liked keeping her clients dipping into their pockets, shallow as they might be. So she sucked his dick, spat, got her parts shipped in two days later, and then found a new supplier. Simple. Transactional. The pros outweighed the cons.

She lets Napoleon play the amateur at the far side of the poker table, and lets her eyes linger on the prize. Kuznetsov is not unhandsome to look at. Skittish, slightly balding, a thin sort of jaw, but strong enough arms from the roughness of Russian life. He fills out his suit well. He’s even managing a decent run at the game tonight. He is not, however, tall.

Gaby doesn’t like that she notices that.

Illya is--

Out of the picture, on this mission. Extraneous. An unnecessary risk. Let him stew.

She’s the only pretty girl in the room who’s not a waitress, and she hooks the mark so easily.

*

He kisses her often, and badly. As soon as they reach his room - a room, not a suite - he presses her against the closed door and devours her, tonguing the backs of her teeth. It’s difficult to pretend to enjoy it, but simple enough to be overwhelmed, so she goes for that instead. Waverly’s plan, after all: a weak woman to let the Russian feel strong.

Gaby wonders if Kuznetsov had a wife back in the motherland, and suspects, if there is one, she might not miss him too desperately.

He looks at her body in a way she doesn’t appreciate, and she has to remind herself that this is easy. Just the sum of its parts, a mechanical action with a clear end goal. It’s her role, and Gaby poses for him, coquettish on the bed, kneeling up, canting her hip, letting him put his sweating hands on her bare breasts. He sweats more than she’d anticipated, and it had made taking off her dress difficult, his fingers slippery on the zipper. She had pulled it over her head in the end, made a game of it, tossed it to the corner as though such a glittering jewel was nothing to her: only him, only him. He had smoothed down her kinked-up hair with those clammy palms, his fingers bumping over her hairpins. One of them, set deep near her nape, hiding a few drops of laudanum in a dainty glass vial. Imperceptible, unless you were looking.

His English is poor and though Illya has taught her a few words of childish Russian - the tip of his finger running over her lips as she had shaped the words, his smile unguarded - communication was never planned for nor anticipated. He knows his pleases and thank-yous at least, and when he slips his fingers between her legs - not inside, but sudden and close - she hums under her breath like it feels good. Illya has a fascination with the parts of her that react less obviously to his ministrations: the back of her knee, maybe, where he can plant soft kisses, or the curve of her shoulder. No matter how rough they are to start with, he always slows down by the time he puts his hand or mouth to her clit.

 _Focus_ , Gaby tells herself sternly. She kisses Kuznetsov, proactive, and lets him put his tongue in her mouth again.

He’s rushing, now that he has her so close. It must have been some time since he last fucked a woman, especially one as easy as Gaby is allowing herself to be. He doesn’t even bother to strip fully, just yanks down his braces and untucks his shirt, pulls his trousers down to his ankles and kicks them off like a frantic schoolboy on a football pitch. Gaby wraps her hand around his dick to make sure she seems eager, and he makes an ugly noise.

She wants to get on with it now. Lies back, open, encouraging. She’ll shower while he sleeps, she decides. His sweating hands are stroking ungainly along her jawline and chin, and it feels like they’re leaving marks.

“I should fuck you first,” he gasps; the longest sentence he’s said to her since they started this dance.

“Before what?” she asks, tilting her head, overly coy.

And then his hands go to her neck.

He’s as strong as she’d guessed; and he’s strangling her.

**iii. the killing**

Gaby remembers kneeing him off of her.

The painful gulp of air - it must have been ten, twelve seconds since she took a breath. There’s nothing to do about her wooziness so she uses her limbs like clubs, aiming for his weak points: under the arm, his groin, his eyes. She gets her knuckles under his cheekbone and grinds there; a little higher and she’d have popped his eyeball with the same move. But she’s small and lightheaded, and he’s desperate. A sudden, wild violence.

Thinking back, there was no need for him to be. Clearly, naked, she had no goddamn weapon on her. Only the hairpin and her wits.

He gets in a backhand across her temple that stuns her a second time, she slumps to the ground between the bed and the coffee table. Everything is hard wood in this Swiss mountain nightmare, and she cracks her head hard on the lip of the table, almost blinded. She flails for whatever’s closest. Her wrist connects with his ankle, and she feels his hand against her scalp, braces herself for the searing yank as he wraps her hair in his fist, pulls up. Gaby yelps, kicks out, scrambling. Her heel sends a champagne glass flying - god, they had gone to the kitchens before they went up, Gaby giggly and sleepy-eyed, asked in broken English for a bottle on ice and two flutes - but she manages to find purchase on the thick carpet, twists under his arm, right through the crook of his elbow until he’s forced to let her go or break his wrist.

She tries to grab for the second glass, and gets the neck of the bottle instead. It’s unopened, slick wet with condensation, and when he charges her a second time, she heaves it like an olympian, turning from her chest and hurling up.

The bottle is no shotput, and doesn’t have far to go.

It shatters against his head almightily. She thinks she might let out a grunting scream with the effort of it, drowned out by the smash of the glass and the thump of Kuznetsov’s torso hitting the floor. There’s a damp, striking pain in her bare side where the alcohol and shrapnel had burst between their bodies.

Gaby crouches on the soft carpet, her head between her arms, her legs curled under her body.

She stays down, breathing for a moment,

Kuznetsov makes no move.

All she keeps thinking is, _were the walls thick enough to muffle us?_ An old, wooden chateaux like this. Hardy wooden slats and redbrick.

Another breath. Slowly, unable to stop shaking, she gets up, lets the blood flood back to her brain. Tries to find all her senses again. She leaves sight until last of all: then opens her eyes.

Kuznetsov’s mouth is moving like a fish. Open, closed. Open, closed. Open.

Open.

He is dead.

There is a two inch shard of rich green glass sticking almost comically out of the left hand side of his head. Blood oozes and spurts out from the wound onto the thick, cream carpet, coating each strand. Raspberry compote on vanilla.

The smell is visceral. Not yet fetid, but it makes her gag. Gaby takes a conscious step back, away from the pooling blood, and then closes her eyes again for a very long time.

She tries to breathe steadily.

She tries to breathe steadily, and does everything methodically. Fighting a rising panic.

**v. the extraction**

She doesn’t realise how relieved she is to see Napoleon until he’s there.

Gaby feels small, pitiable, half naked and wounded; the dress was too much of an effort to clamber back into. But he takes her in the same way he looks at the mess of the room, the body and the blood: objectively. Calculating.

Illya is close behind him. Fear always makes him noisy. Those heavy footfalls.

By god, she doesn’t want him to see her. A failure--

Napoleon blocks him from coming into the room, almost immediately. Puts his arm around Illya’s neck, strikingly intimate, and turns Illya’s head in towards his cheek, whispering commands.

“Let me see her,” she hears Illya hiss. That shuddering terror courses through her again, that he will see her and judge her. She knows he comes from a long line of command who look upon professional misjudgement as a personal slight, no tolerance for mistakes, and she doesn’t know if she could bear the weight of his disappointment.

“She’s fine,” Napoleon says, short. “Do your job.”

“Solo--”

“Do your _job_ , Kuryakin.”

Illya pushes forward against Napoleon’s skin, as though he might walk straight through him. Then he turns, spits visibly, a tangible anger, and leaves without another word.

Gaby breathes out. She had been--

She breathes, deeply, out. Slumps against the wall. She didn’t realise she’d been standing so on guard, but her body shakes with it.

She’ll have to see Illya sooner or later.

Napoleon, at least, is neutral ground.

His efficient pragmatism knocks some sense into her. He goes to the bathroom first, ignoring the body as though it’s nothing more than a stain on the carpet. Finds a white robe, unembellished but warm, and wraps it around her shoulders. Gaby bites the inside of her cheek, chastising herself for not thinking to do the same, but Napoleon’s hands are heavy and tight on her shoulders, holding her together. “Where are his clothes?” he asks. His voice is bracingly familiar, none of that faux southern drawl. All business. “His shoes?”

She points, and Napoleon fetches everything like a concierge, folding the trousers over his arm, holding the shoes between his knuckles. Gaby can see that they’re unpolished, very slightly scuffed. Kuznetsov was a desperate man. Didn’t have time to sweat the small details.

Gaby doesn’t retch, but puts her hand over her mouth as if she might. When she presses her palm against them, her lips feel tender from bad kisses.

“Give me a hand,” Napoleon says, not a question, and she’s grateful for the distraction.

They hold Kuznetsov’s legs up one at a time, and slide his trousers back on. Napoleon delicately buttons his fly, tucks in his shirt. He rolls both the dead man’s socks on, but only laces up one shoe at first; the second he drags across the carpet, making a rough skidmark, and then that shoe is returned too. The champagne flutes are straightened, the coffee table - a victim of their ruckus - uprighted. Napoleon is setting up a shallow excuse, Gaby realises, a reason for a bad fall. Lost his bearings, lost his footing, grabbed for the nearest sturdy surface and missed by a mile.

She gets a kind of satisfaction out of watching Napoleon work; or does usually. But her hands are still shaking.

Gaby swears, under her breath.

“Who saw you?” Napoleon asks suddenly. His timing, in knowing when she needs her attention wrangled, is impeccable, and Gaby’s a little jealous of how good he is at this job. A soldier, a thief, a conman and a spy, all wrapped up into one. All she has is a family history of bad decisions and a pretty face.

She rolls her eyes, defensive. “A busy hotel on a poker night? How many people do you think?”

It’s not like she was covert. That was never part of the plan. Illya was the only ghost in this particular mission.

“Go to the kitchens,” he says, firm. “Act drunk. Coy. Ask for another bottle of champagne; you’ve finished the first. Apologise, thank them, be noisy. Make sure you get as many pairs of eyes on you as possible.”

He looks at his wristwatch, clocks the time. “Do it, and don’t rush,” he says. “We’ll be gone when you get back. Leave the champagne at the bedside, open. Pour a little out down the sink. Give it an hour before you leave, if you can stand to.” Her eyes flit to the dead body, panicked, but Napoleon nudges her gaze back towards him, his finger light on the side of her chin. “Keep your head high, fix your smile, and meet us at the rendezvous. Got it?”

“I have it,” she murmurs.

Napoleon cups both of his hands around her jaw, and for a moment Gaby thinks she could sigh into sleep right there in his palms. As easy as drowning. He looks as though he could kiss her forehead, and then, a rare tell in his eyes, thinks better of it. Steps back with only a nod and a smile.

 _Cowardly_ , Gaby thinks, and is immediately ashamed of herself.

“One more thing,” Napoleon says, not as lightly as perhaps he means to. “Don’t cross paths with Peril.”

It sounds like a warning.

They both know Illya’s self-control is paper thin. He’d blow her cover the second he saw her. Her flushed cheeks. Her straggly hair. The bathrobe, slipped down, calculated, to reveal one pale, bare shoulder. Even if she keeps the collar up around her bruising neck, he’d see her lips. Her sore mouth.

“I have it,” she says again, determined to salvage this.

*

So Gaby Teller gets back to work.

**vi. the safe house**

It’s approaching dawn when she arrives. The cobbled street - quaint in the daytime - is steep and unsettled under her heels, trying to trip her. She can see her breath, and thinks at once of childhood holidays with her family in the Bavarian mountains: pine trees, generous furs, logs on the fire pit, and her father’s loving hand around her small shoulders.

It was a long lifetime ago. Her father is dead.

The house is a rickety thing, a two-story cabin, owned once upon a time by an ageing Swiss couple who had nothing better to do with their time than collect knick-knacks and gather dust. The front door needs oiling, and squeaks badly, from the crunch of the rusting latch to the thick hinges. It’s noisy, for a safe house. Better cover, Gaby thinks, than sneaking around in the shadows. Noise is noticeable, obnoxious, and she’d rather be remembered for that than uneasy suspicion.

She drops the keys, only half on purpose, and lets them clatter, allows herself to swear. Her hands are shaking again. Had they stopped? Or had she just managed, clasping the wet neck of a fresh champagne bottle with both hands to compensate for the tremor?

The lights in the house are all off, save for a dim old table lamp, barely visible from the outside through thick cotton curtains. She toes off her shoes, a little vicious in kicking them aside, and finds an open bottle of bourbon waiting under the lamp, one glass poured for her and another glass down by the look of the liquor: Napoleon’s handiwork. On an easier night she’d wonder if that’s how he always winds down after tampering with evidence; after getting his hands dirty in the name of patriotism.

But the night feels heavy on her sallow shoulders. Too weighty for aimless pondering about Napoleon Solo’s predilections.

He’ll have made contact with Waverly by now, given him the briefest of reports, but Waverly’s always been good at reading between their lines, all three of them. There’s very little he can’t guess about Illya, and Gaby isn’t yet practised at hiding her annoyance at being handled. Napoleon, the suavest of them all, leaves plenty of negative space for Waverly to poke into. There’ll be a sharp dressing down waiting for her when they touch base.

Gaby knocks the drink back too quickly, chokes a little, and blames that for the saltwater that pools immediately in the corner of her eyes. She scrubs her face, and lets out a weak sob into the cavern of her palms. One leads to another, and then she swears, unquietly, and inhales with the shaky composure of a child who’s just learnt that crying is uncouth. Two controlled breaths, and one more after that.

The bourbon scorched her throat: that’s what she’ll say to him.

The stairs in this place squeak. He’ll hear her coming up. Napoleon too, though he’s made himself obviously scarce. She wonders, distracted, how Illya acted when Napoleon returned alone. Were punches thrown? Tears shed? Or were they stoic men to the last, terse nods in place of reassurance?

She spends the troop upstairs controlling her breath. In to the count of four, out to the count of six.

Gaby Teller has killed a man tonight. Her neck aches. She’s desperate to sleep, or at least to pretend. But Illya, she knows, will have waited up for her; and she isn’t wrong.

Gaby only glimpses him as she opens the bedroom door. Turns before he can take stock of her, closes the door quietly. Napoleon will be listening in, of course. It’s not for his benefit, but to give her time. She doesn’t want to hear the tone in his voice. Doesn’t want to see the unhappiness in his eyes up close. So she turns, as if he’s not worth her time. Presses her forehead against the old wood for a moment, takes a short breath. Closes her eyes.

She braces herself. Fixes her expression. Not a smile, but something disdainful. As if his worry is a weakness.

He’s stood to attention when she turns. A good soldier. He’s been pacing, she can tell from the heavy marks in the dusty carpet. Not even bothering to cover his tracks, but a mess of overlapping shoe-prints as he stewed. God knows what he thought she was up to. What Napoleon’s told him. That the mission was compromised, she supposes, angry.

He opens his mouth to speak.

“Well?” She says at once, determined to have the first and last word. It knocks him off balance, and Gaby takes a moment to cross her arms, plant her feet, stay sturdy.

“Are you okay?” is what he says, when he manages to.

She scoffs. “I’ll live. The mission was a bust. Just like you wanted.”

A dark anger passes his face and it soothes her far more than his concern. It’s familiar. He’s angry day to day; it’s only around her that he worries. “I would never--”

“You assumed I wasn’t up to the task,” she shrugs, her voice light. She dares a casual few steps into the room, scuffing her toe over his anxious shoe-prints. “You were right, of course.”

“Don’t you--”

Gaby doesn’t let him talk. She’s uncorked now. This whole night she’s been a capped bottle, contained, fizzing and nervy. Napoleon kept her steady, but Illya shakes her up. He never means to. They’re just catalysts, nothing to temper the two of them. It’s why they fight. It’s why they fuck.

And god, now that the thought’s in her head--

“If we played everything by _your_ rules, we’d have knocked him out in two hits. Done and done. Ransacked the room, found all the data, left a mess but--” she huffs out a noise of short derision, “--what does it matter if the job gets done?” She waves her hand, dismissive, but it’s still shaking, and she’s abruptly ashamed. Bile in the back of her throat. The taste of it makes her double down. “Brute force, that’s your method, hmm? The only thing you know.”

It’s too far and she knows it. He takes a step towards her, and she realises he had been stooping. He is almost unfathomably tall, and she is, as she’s been sharply reminded tonight, ever so delicate. Bruises easily. Fingerprints on her breast and her neck. A dead man’s ministrations.

Gaby swallows a retch. He’s trying to interrupt again but she barrells on. If she stops talking, she’ll cry. If she starts crying, she won’t know how to stop.

“There are other ways,” she says, digging deep and finding something haughty to hide the fear in her voice, “of extracting information from a mark than ramming your fist down his throat and pulling out his tongue.”

She’s facing away when she hears the blow. Didn’t realise, not consciously, that she had turned her back to him until the snap of old plaster and Illya’s low, pained grunt pull her to attention.

His knuckles aren’t bleeding from the punch. Violence is too familiar to his skin, hardened and rough from overuse, but she takes a jerking step towards him, some suppressed instinct to mother his pain suckered up from her belly while she’s weak. But he holds out his hand to stop her.

The crackled dent in the wall sheds dry flecks of paint onto the floor, and he talks with a dullness in his voice like he’s dictating. Emotionless. “When I was nineteen,” he says, looking at his fist instead of at her, “my superiors told me I took after my mother in more ways than one.” He rubs the bare strip of flesh where he used to wear his father’s watch. More often than not he forgoes it now, too precious to let it get stolen again. His voice is dangerously steady. “I was placed as a cadet in the Baltic fleet, and told to fellate three naval officers the KGB wanted to frame for sodomy.”

Gaby can’t help a little intake of breath, shocked. She doesn’t ask if he did it.

Illya is--

Good at his job.

“You make assumptions of me,” he says, some shaky anger seeping into his voice now. When he looks at her, his eyes are raw. Startling gentle and blue, red around the rim. He had to wait a long time for her to come back. “I just wanted to know that you were alright.”

“I’ll live,” Gaby says again, hating for a moment that she can’t soften for him. He asks very little of her, in truth: just that she take care of herself. She forces her voice to be gentler. “We didn’t--he didn’t get that far before he decided to kill me.”

She means it as a morbid joke. Even as she’s saying it, she plans to laugh, bitter, at the mess she’s made. But it comes out as a sob. Horrified, Gaby hears the hiccupping choke in her throat, and puts her hands to her neck as if to stop it, and her fingers dig into the bruises in her skin, and she’s crying, she’s crying, she can’t stop herself--

Illya goes to her. She doesn’t see him drop to his knees, her eyes shut tight, but she feels his hands rest so gently against her thighs, gasps in a haggard sob when he presses his face against her belly. That hateful dress must scratch against his skin, his stubble, and she wants to rip it off, feel his breath on her skin, over the shallow wounds on her hips. She grabs for his hair with both hands, desperate for ballast.

“Undress me,” she whispers, tears on her bottom lip when she speaks.

Illya looks up at her, wide-eyed. She loves to see him at this angle on kinder days. “No,” he murmurs, “no, you must rest--”

“What I _must_ is up to me,” she snaps, and her anger is a branch to hang onto when she’s this close to a precipice.

She wants to put Illya’s hands around her neck. She can’t tell if the bruises are visible yet, or if, in a day or two, they’ll be a yellowish haze, purple-flecked, marks in the shape of a strange man’s fingers. Illya’s hands are wide enough to cover so many of her wounds.

She needs--

At once, her skin feels too hot, too aware of her blood in her veins, dashing so dangerously close to the surface. She nudges him back with her knee and pulls the dress off over her head and shoulders, rough with it on purpose, balling and throwing it into a dark corner of the room. It stirs up a feathery cloud of dust, and she wonders when was the last time someone fucked in this room. Too long.

She grabs Illya close to her, possessive. Now the thought is stuck in her mind, she needs him inside of her with an ugly desperation; needs to remember that she is alive, he is alive--

Kuznetsov is _dead_ \--

“Where did Solo send you?” she says, carding her fingers ungently through his hair, her fingertips dragging lines along his cheek, his rough jaw, the back of his ears.

Illya hesitates. He kisses her belly, just below the navel. “To tie up loose ends,” he murmurs.

The single bodyguard.

“What did you do with the body?” she asks, her hands stilling.

“Burnt,” is all he replies.

“Inelegant,” she whispers, but she nods. They cannot wipe each other’s hands clean. That’s okay. Illya is living proof that it's okay: a killer of men and yet human, self-respecting. Capable of love.

There are sequins catching the low light around her feet. She knows she’s exhausted, won’t last long, only adrenaline and terror and relief keeping her upright now. There’s some tension in Illya’s wide shoulders, but he’s always been easy to convince when it comes to Gaby Teller. Too pliable. She wants his mouth on her, always does, but she wants to come with him inside of her. Wants the reminder that there is more inside a man than only blood--

Illya peels down her knickers with care, letting her step out of them and saying nothing about the wobble in her ankles before he puts his mouth to her thigh, kissing upwards. His stubble is rough from being on the move the past few days, a night flight into Switzerland and an unstable evening in the hotel, too much worry to think about showering, shaving; he’ll leave marks on her skin, delicate scratches, and she wants it at once. Illya’s brand. Only his.

His big hands on her waist hold Gaby steady as he puts his mouth to her clit. Solid tongue, gentle teeth. He is built for violent deeds, and always shocks her with his softness. She doesn’t know which part of him is more magnetic; what she expects or what she’s given. His tongue lathes right across the very parting of her and back up to her clit but he never once darts in. She can’t stand it.

“Harder,” Gaby hisses.

“No,” he murmurs, hot breath against her skin.

She grabs for his head to push him further in, but he snatches her wrist, drags it back to her side. Doesn’t hold it there, though: a request, not an order. “No,” he says once more, and his voice rumbles against her sex.

“Fuck me,” she says, harsh enough to hide in.

“Only if you want,” Illya murmurs.

“I didn’t think of you once,” she gasps, a little spiteful, widening her legs. “Not at all, all night.”

“That’s alright,” he says, all his fight gone now. He is laying a trail of kisses along the crease of her thigh, where she must taste of all sweat and nothing sweet. “You’ll think of me now.”

For the first time that night, she breathes unsteadily, and doesn’t try to keep it in check. Not with Illya.

Not for Illya.

He’s easily strong enough to pick her up, put her gently on the bed behind them. As soon as the weight is off her feet, Gaby feels exhaustion cover her like a winter blanket, clammy and thick, and she does little more than let her legs slide open and watch him undress through her parted knees. In this sort of darkness, just before dawn, he is more shape than form. Only visible where the light cuts into him, streetlamps from the distant outdoors: an elbow, the strain of his tense jaw, his long legs, the meat of his thighs.

They’ve done this enough times before to know the easiest ways, what with Illya’s height and Gaby being so slight. There are tricks to it, made harder by the cuts and flecks on her left side, the shower of glass that battered her; so she lies on her right, lets him spoon up behind her, lets Illya tentatively lift her thigh to make space to press in.

She’s never been able to keep silent when he enters her. A thick pressure that doesn’t relent, even for his agonising steadiness, and she sighs out some keening noise that might be nonsense or might be his name. The reality of it, of his cock resting fully inside her, of his name, the truth of his name, no cover, no falsehoods, fills her chest with some visceral emotion and she can’t tell whether it’s euphoria or fear. Gaby only knows she wants more.

She became an adult in a war that left her wanting; but she was a spoiled child. Beloved by her father. A few years of being granted everything she asked. It’s an easy instinct to fall back on.

She drags Illya’s hand from her leg, further up, and pushes his fingers against her clit. He only circles there slowly, not wanting to overwhelm her.

Gaby wants to be overwhelmed. She doesn’t want the last man to have caused her pain to be--

“I don’t--” Illya’s voice is little more than a low breath. How can he be so brutish and yet this soft? “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”

It’s a stupid thing to admit and a dangerous thing to feel. Gaby is angry, all at once, angry at his honesty. She is angry that she’s let him love her.  Love is too delicate a thing for the hands of killers.

She is angry that--

She doesn’t know what she’d do, either, if she lost--

“Fuck me,” she manages.

“Slow down,” he begs her.

“Please--”

“No--” And he kisses her, leaning up and tilting her head back, that awful softness again that makes her shake with how treacherous it feels. Kissing her tender neck, too. The worst parts of her.

“Make love to me,” Gaby whispers.

“Alright,” Illya whispers back.

She marvels, every time, about how he can take it this slow, making love to her from his hips. How he doesn’t snap, when he’s so quick to lose his cool in every other walk of life. Broad and gentle inside of her, enough to make her writhe, filled, fulfilled--

“What would I do--” he asks, expecting no answer, and she murmurs around a whine, “You’d do your job--”

It would be so foolish to let him come inside her, but she’s been a damned fool all night; why stop now? She’s close. She’s so close.

He wraps his wide arms around her, tight, and can’t help but quicken his thrust when he comes. The sound he makes is lost and honest, open-mouthed, and she’s sure hers is too. All semblance of rationality lost for a split-second before they come to their senses again. Gaby craves it, every time. A single moment of emptiness: nobody dead, nobody alive, no mission to run, no fear of loss. Just bodies, doing what they do.

They’re quiet, for a long time.

He kisses gently against the back of her neck, in the silence. Gaby wants his mouth on hers and shifts up until he slips out of her uneasily, both of them stifling gasps. Her side is sore against the scratching bed-sheets, but she doesn’t go far. Just turns and lets his arms and chest shelter her. Tugs childishly on the lobes of his ears until he chuckles, low, tilts his face to hers, kisses her; just kisses her.

“We’ll need to leave quickly in the morning,” she says eventually. Reality beginning to seep in. She licks against his bottom lip before it sours the taste of him.

“Solo has the bags packed,” he murmurs, stroking her hair.

Quiet, again. The sound of foreign birds just waking with the dawn outside, clear in the high mountain air. It will snow later, a dreary drizzle, but for now everything is fairytale and crisp.

Only hours ago, she’d--

She nudges her forehead against Illya’s chin. Buries her face under his jaw, against his neck. He smells most like himself here, in these darker spaces that never catch the light and she breathes in, deep and slow.

He says nothing for a very long time, and then admits, an afterthought from a conversation long past: “Not all of your assumptions about me are wrong.”

Gaby likes that she only knows a part of Illya. He has let so many of his walls crumble around her, but not all; no, not all. Spies should have some secrets, she thinks.

To have something to bargain with, when the time comes.

**vii. the state of affairs**

Waverly is always soft on her at debriefs, she knows; clipped but not cruel. One dead man is easy enough to smudge out of history, and Napoleon’s tricks of the trade served her well. He’s a single column in a local newspaper - a tragic accident, a fatal fall, a morality tale about the dangers of drinking.

Waverly’s Circus boys ended up planting a slippery agent in with the Swiss mortuary. They cleaned up his room well. Delicate, and very, very thorough.

“We’ll try to be gentler on you next time, shan’t we?” Waverly says, something cold in his smile.

“No need,” Gaby shrugs, aloof.

Waverly’s laugh is thin, and it makes her sore. “If not for your sake,” he says, “then perhaps for our Russian friend.”

Gaby looks away, shrugging again. She’s been wearing a scarf around her neck for three days, and wearing it damn well.

“There’s no need,” is all she says.


End file.
